in the mud of that afternoon, our nervesshed like wet clothes, you spilled over melike silt. I held what felt like millions of years

converging in one place—your right handan open bloom. I set the fossil in your palmlike it was fate, this hollow space only I could fill.

Lucian Mattison is an Argentinian American poet. His full-length collection, Peregrine Nation, won the 2014 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize from The Broadkill River Press. He is the winner of the 2016 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize and his poems appear in Four Way Review, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, Nashville Review, and elsewhere online and in print. His fiction appears in Fiddleblack and is forthcoming in Nano Fiction and Per Contra. He works at The George Washington University and is an associate editor for Big Lucks. To read more, visit www.lucianmattison.com